Mar. 21, 2013

Written by

The Tennessean

Instead of waiting a week or longer to see if mold will grow in a test tube, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has a much faster method for diagnosing a rare form of meningitis and other fungal infections.

The agency’s scientists have developed a DNA-sequencing test that produces results within 48 hours. The new test also has a higher detection rate, according to an article published this month in the American Society of Microbiology. CDC microbiologists devised the test during the early days of the fungal meningitis outbreak and and quietly began studying its effectiveness.

The DNA test proved to have a 29 percent detection rate, compared with just 9 percent for traditional test-tube cultures. Since the new test does not have federal approval as a diagnostic tool, doctors will have to ask state health departments to ship tissue samples to the CDC for surveillance testing.

Health officials will accept samples from patients with symptoms that match the CDC case definitions for fungal infections linked to contaminated steroid medicine manufactured by New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass.

The test has been used on patients from Tennessee, where 150 people have been sickened and 14 have died after exposure to the tainted drugs.

“We had about 75 percent of our specimens to come from four states,” said Mary E. Brandt, one of the CDC microbiologists who conducted the study. “There were four states that were very heavily impacted. They were Tennessee, Michigan, Virginia and Indiana. From Tennessee, we received 110 specimens from 72 patients.”

She cautioned that a negative result on the new test does not rule out an infection. The CDC has more research planned.

“We are planning to participate in a study designed to follow a group of these NECC steroid-injected sick patients for at least a year,” Brandt said. “Our colleagues are nearly ready to start. We hope to answer questions like when patients can safely stop taking anti-fungal medication, are other anti-fungal drugs helpful and what kinds of long-term symptoms do these patients show.”